When Decades Happen – Part V
When Decades Happen – Part V
Capital, Meet Communism
So far, we have explored the 18th and 19th centuries and how revolution evolved as a weapon to be deployed to destroy nation states from within. By the early 20th century, communist uprisings were abject failures. Despite the help from British Russophobes, Karl Marx died without ever seeing a successful revolution. Throughout the 19th century, Russia was fattened up to suffer the same fate as the French monarchy one hundred years earlier.
Russia was in collective shock after Czar Alexander II was assassinated. The nation became polarized by his son’s, Alexander III, brutal oppression by using his secret police. The economy declined and poverty skyrocketed. Finally, Russia was utterly humiliated in a war against Japan. By all accounts, the 1905 Russian revolution should have followed the same path as the French Revolution. However, Czar Nicholas II was willing to reform his empire and hand more power over to the people. The revolution failed, and Lenin fled back to his Marxist rats-nest, mired in failure.
1905 should have been the end of the failed Enlightened ideology of communism. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Communism found an unlikely partner, and the 20th century proved to be a descent into madness, with hundreds of millions of lives lost, and billions of souls changed forever.
Marxism is a Racket
In our article, Hegel, War, the Owl and the Slaves of Bohemia, we provided a summary of one of the most important essays written in the 20th century. General Smedley Butler was the most decorated Marine veteran of all time, and his insights on who really benefits from war is timeless.
General Butler provided a massive portfolio of receipts to back his claim that wars are nothing more than revenue engines for corporations willing to profit from conflict.
However, none of this corporate profit that General Butler referenced was possible without a rapid expansion in the supply of money and credit. Just a few years earlier, the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. When America entered WWI, the Federal Reserve was ready, and the national debt skyrocketed as the federal government embarked on an ambitious spending spree, filling the coffers of corporations supplying materiel for the military.
Paul Warburg was a Prussian banking immigrant. In New York, he joined the German-American banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Co, and made it his mission to establish a central bank in America. He succeeded with the formation of the US Federal Reserve, and in 1917 he was the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
Coincidentally, his brother Max Warburg was advising the Kaiser at the same time on financial matters concerning WWI2. It would appear that as America and Germany were locked in battle, the two brothers were working out ways to adequately finance both sides of the war. By the end of WWI, the American taxpayer was in eye watering debt while the American corporations were flush with new capital. Germany, of course, fared much worse; the nation was bankrupt, taken over by socialists, and about to plunge into a Weimar hyper-inflationary inferno. German corporations, however, were making bank as they snapped up the nations resources and supply chains for pennies.
For both nations, corporate balance sheets were flush with new capital, with their citizens shouldering the burden of their respective governments’ mismanagement. Be that as it may, the fates of America and Germany paled in comparison to what Russia was about to experience. 1917 marked the first successful Marxist revolution. Russian history and culture were about to be annihilated and replaced with a communist utopian hell-scape.
Contrary to the historical narrative, the Soviet Union was anything but a triumphant peoples’ uprising. Its success as a communist dictatorship depended on the one thing Marxist ideologues profess to hate; capital, lots of capital.
As Germany and America threw innocent men onto the battlefield against each other, the bankers, crony capitalists and power-brokers from both nations worked together. This time, the Marxist revolution in Russia was going to succeed, and the nation’s supply chains and resources would be carved up like a piece of meat, along with its people.
Ironically, all that Marxism needed to succeed, was money. Marxism was about to become the biggest racket of all-time.
Enlightened Capitalism
In this series we have shed light on the origins of liberal progressivism. During the Enlightenment, Frederick the Great declared himself an Enlightened despot, and in doing so became the first liberal progressive. He promptly formed a Prussian central bank and set up a centralized command economy whereby he could control what was produced, imported and exported to and from Prussia.
Amongst Frederick’s freemasonry brothers, communism emerged from the Enlightenment and was thought of being a superior form of governance for the future of humanity. Therefore, it should be no surprise that Karl Marx, who also thought of himself as part of the Enlightenment, demanded central banking as a central tenet to his Communist Manifesto.
Frederick wanted a central bank to control the Prussian economy. Karl Marx believed a central bank monopoly was needed to control a communist economy. Vladimir Lenin agreed:
Central banking is the essence of liberal progressivism. A small group of self-declared morally and intellectually superior sycophants determine the behavior of an entire nation. To obtain absolute control over the people, money needs to be deployed in an economy as both an incentive and punishment to collectively manage human action.
When Paul Warburg arrived from Germany, he was instantly received by Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb allegedly fled Germany during the 1848 communist uprisings. They used their banking partnership in America as a platform to import bankers from Germany with the same liberal progressive ideals as themselves. Eventually, Paul Warburg achieved what had not been attempted in America since Andrew Jackson; a private central bank. Banking in America was now in the hands of progressives.
After 1913, the economic landscape in America had changed forever. The laissez-faire entrepreneurs were bought-out, outbid and replaced by monopolists, cartels and financiers with priority access to central bank credit. Wall St. bankers and financiers became part of a new, progressive form of capitalism.
Crony Capitalism was the new flavor of the day!!
American political author and progressive reformer, George Bernard Shaw, summed up the situation perfectly:
Even President Woodrow Wilson seemed to understand the power of central banking and monopolies:
And so it was, the capitalist elite of America gradually moved away from entrepreneurial industrial capital formation, and toward financial engineering. Monopolies mobilized society to work for the man with access to the most credit and the most powerful politicians. The fact that America’s greatest period of growth occurred from 1871-1913, and without a central bank, was now forgotten. The liberal progressive economy spread its tentacles into every aspect of American society.
When Russia failed to become a communist state in 1905, Enlightened liberal progressives around the world were shocked. How could they monopolize the vast Russian resources if the people did not submit to their morally and intellectually superior will?
After 1905, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin lived in exile, but they both carefully analyzed the strategic failures of 1905. Their study did not go unnoticed, and by 1917 they had attracted attention from some of the wealthiest and most powerful liberal progressive figures around the world. Come hell or high water, Russia was going to be Enlightened.
The Origins of the Bolshevik Revolution
For the remainder of this article, we will draw upon famed researcher Antony C. Sutton and his comprehensive work on the Russian Revolution.
The title speaks for itself and is a highly recommended read for anyone who wants to understand how and why communism has persisted and plagued the world since 1917. In short, communism is only possible when it is supported by capital that is controlled by a progressive central banking system. Eventually, one cannot survive without the other, and today we are living in a world where both communism and crony capitalism are merging into a Marxist global superstate.
The Marxist Sales Pitch
Well before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the American financial elite and their families were being sold the virtues of Bolshevism. It began in the university lecture halls, and permeated to the family dinner table. Many of America’s progressive capitalists were already on-board the Bolshevik Express:
This is notable because it meant that those who had the potential to invest in Russia were already buttered-up to the idea of a new, bolshevized Russia; even though the revolution had not yet occurred.
The man who perhaps let the bolshevik cat out of the bag was Olof Aschberg. Olof was a Russian-Jewish banker who was the head of the Swedish bank, Nya Banken. During WWI, Olof’s banking operations were clearly helping the Germans. At the same time, he was representing Czar Nicholas II in New York. The only thing Olof was loyal to was the pending Bolshevik Revolution, and in 1916 he explained what was about to happen in Russia:
Not only was Olof explaining to the crowd that Russia was about to have an “awakening”, he was also signalling that some American corporations were already in Russia and ready to capitalize on the huge opportunity.
Olof Aschberg appears everywhere before, during and after the Bolshevik revolution. He was also a key player for the Marxists in the Spanish Civil War, over a decade later. What this reveals is that Marxist revolutions are not sporadic people-uprisings. They are carefully orchestrated revolutions that destroy nations from within to create enormous future investment opportunities.
All Aboard the Bolshevik Express!
We will now focus on the two main characters of the Bolshevik revolution; Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin
As we have explained, Prussia was obsessed with revolution as a weapon, dating back to the French Revolution. The science of revolution appeared to become the main syllabus coming out of the Prussian University of Jena. Fichte, Hegel, and Marx all contributed their theories on the philosophy and justification of revolutionary theory at Jena. If anyone wanted Russia destroyed from within, it was Prussia.
Therefore, it should be no surprize that German agents maintained contact with Lenin while he was in exile. If there was another chance of a Russian revolution, the Germans were ready to deploy Lenin.
German Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg was the bureaucrat in charge of releasing funds to Lenin. Theobold, perhaps unsurprizingly, was from a very prominent German banking family.
To maintain a certain level of plausible deniability, there was a chain-of-custody for the flow of funds from Germany to Lenin.
Furstenberg was the direct link to Lenin, and Parvus was a direct link to the German government. However, both men needed a compliant bank that could facilitate their transactions. Olof Aschberg’s Swedish bank was ready, willing and able.
The other curious aspect regarding Lenin’s trip from Germany to Moscow, was a dossier that fell into the hands of the American diplomat in Russia, Edgar Sisson:
This was perhaps the most damning of all information that came out of the Bolshevik Revolution, however it was later determined to be misinformation. We will address this issue shortly.
If the information was factual, it would mean that not only was the Bolshevik revolution a German operation, but that most of the key military officials for the Bolsheviks during the civil war that followed were German officers. In short, Russia was taken over by Germany lock, stock and two smoking barrels.
This is interesting, especially when we take a look at Lenin’s partner in crime, Leon Trotsky, and his journey to Petrograd from New York.
Trotsky
On January 13, 1917, Lev Bronstein arrived in New York with his family. He could only speak German and Russian, however his German was reportedly much better. Bronstein had little to no money, and made about $12 a week writing for a Russian-language newspaper.
Three months later he was arrested on the S.S.Kristianiafjord by Canadian authorities in Halifax. The ship was heading to Petrograd, and he was travelling with an American passport and $10,000 in cash.
In only three months, and without speaking English, Lev Bronstein was swimming in cash and became a legalized citizen of the United States. After a brief interrogation, he was released and the ship continued its passage to Russia. How did the bizarre story of Lev Bronstein, later known as Leon Trotsky, come to pass?
We must first have a look at who was on the Trotsky cruise ship when it was intercepted by the Canadians:
Lincoln Steffens was on his way to Russia to participate in the revolution. He was invited to Russia by the financier Charles Crane, who was making frequent visits to Russia and set up the Westinghouse Company there. Steffens was a direct contact, therefore, to both Trotsky and Charles Crane.
The Trotsky-Steffens-Crane-Wilson relationship is significant, particularly with respect to the origins of Trotsky’s grant of American citizenship:
With respect to the $10,000, we can look at a report from Lieutenant Colonel MacLean, from Canadian Military Intelligence. He published the report in his own magazine, “Why Did We Let Trotsky Go?”:
The U.S. government was also aware of the origins of Trotsky’s funds:
The Lenin and Trotsky travelling circus signalled the beginning of the end for Russia, and the birth of the Soviet Union. Loaded with cash, gold, banking contacts, capital investment, fake passports from American and German state departments and special military operators, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution could now begin.
The irony could not be starker. Marxism was a total failure without the immense capital and political power from the uber-wealthy liberal progressive crony capitalist class.
Sisson Revisited
As we showed, the Sisson documents instantly became headlines in America. This is extremely important, because it influenced public opinion and justified the deployment of US troops into Russia. The narrative was that if Lenin and Trotsky were indeed German agents, then Russia was indirectly taken over by Germany. Since Russia was part of a WWI alliance with America, US troops should be sent immediately into Russia.
That is exactly what happened, along with British and French troops.
The New York Post was the only paper suggesting that the Sisson documents were not genuine. Over the years, detailed analysis of the documents proved them to be forgeries. If that was true, then the deployment of US troops into Russia was based off misinformation:
However, this is where the story gets more interesting. The documents were published by the Committee of Public Information. The chairman of the committee was George Creel, who was a big supporter of Wilson, and he leaned heavily toward socialist platforms23. Therefore, one could conclude that he was supportive of the socialist uprising in Russia. Why would he publish a forgery that would see American troops sent to Russia to crush a socialist uprising?
Next, we have the curious case of the information within the Sisson documents. It was highly accurate, and could only come from a source with intimate knowledge of the money-flow to the Bolsheviks. The author of the documents knew many facts regarding the assistance of the Americans, Germans, including Max Warburg, and the Swedish bank run by Olof Aschberg. The reason the documents were declared forgeries was not based on the information:
Therefore, the Sisson forgeries were so obvious, that when they were finally declared as such, everyone who believed them to be real were humiliated and labelled as gullible, dumb Americans. By doing so, all the information contained within the document could be declared as “fake news” designed to manipulate the “dumb masses”. Anyone who questioned this fact could be publicly shamed as a “deplorable”.
This was propaganda 101, and George Creel would go down in history as a master propagandist.
So, what was the point of all of this? There were definitely US troops in Russia, and they were taking on the Bolsheviks wherever they were ordered to do so. The accepted narrative about this historical event arrives at an interesting conclusion:
Really? If Woodrow Wilson and his State Department were so anti-Bolshevik, why did they give Trostky a passport? Why did they call for his release after his detainment in Canada? If the $10,000 he received was known by the State Department to be from German sources, why did this not come into question? Why did the New York bomb squad need to keep an eye on Trotsky the entire time he was in New York?
We now come full circle to allow bullshit to look at itself in the mirror:
Woodrow Wilson and his colleagues were sympathetic to the liberal progressive, Bolshevik cause.
Some of Wilson’s largest donors, like Charles Crane, were in contact with American communists who had direct contact with Trotsky.
Olof Aschberg explained to his New York audience in 1916 that there were already American corporations in Russia, ready to exploit the massive opportunities coming from the “awakening” of Russia into a Marxist state.
Marxism is a verb which describes the collective destruction of a civilization by people infected with the “woke mind-virus” who believe they are marching toward a communist utopia.
Russia was about to be destroyed, resulting in a total breakdown of law and order in the region. It was about to become the richest wasteland in the world.
The Sisson documents, regardless of what was real or fake, deployed American troops into Russia.
Think of the amount that was already invested in the “New Russia”. The break down of law and order was not good for existing capital investment. American troops were not deployed to defeat the Bolshevik revolution. They were there to protect the invested interests of American corporations.
Finally, if we follow the money, we can see that the capitalist elite of America and Germany were acting as partners in the Russian revolution, while at the same time their respective soldiers were mutilating each other on the WW1 battlefields. In order to create plausible deniability, the Sisson documents, and the subsequent rage and troop deployment by the Wilson administration provided a smoke-screen, suggesting that their government was doing everything it could to defeat the Germans, despite the fact that after the war the two nations would carve up the Russian carcass together.
When Lenin and Trotsky finally succeeded in transforming Russia into the Soviet Union, it created the biggest monopoly in the world. Selected corporate contracts with the old Russia would be fulfilled, and a massive return on invested capital for American and German corporations soon followed. Liberal progressive crony capitalism was now in full swing!
Dividing the Spoils
World War I brought about the wholesale destruction of entire regions. The massive technological improvements in weaponry remarkably improved the killing efficiency of the military. Chemical weapons, airplanes, submarines and propaganda all added new dimensions to the art of war. It is during the fog of war when incredible things take place. Only when that fog has lifted do we get to see the true purpose, method and end-state of a military operation.
Once Lenin and Trotsky solidified their grip on Mother Russia, it was time to get back to business. If the Bolsheviks were Marx-purists, they would have relied on the Russian people to collectively form and own the capital of the Soviet Union. In reality, that was all complete bullshit, and Lenin and Trotsky knew this too.
We can therefore see who Trotsky and Lenin had formed pre-Bolshevik agreements with. This was evidenced by the business relationships they developed after taking power. German and American corporations were about to clean up!!
Germany
Almost immediately after the Bolshevik revolution, Germany started investing in Russia. We must first understand that the political power of both nations had completely changed since WWI. Russia was now Marxist, and the collapse of Germany also led to the arrival of a socialist regime. Therefore, they were now more politically aligned and ideologically more inclined to cooperate.
Krupp, Daimler, M.A.N., and the chemical giant IG Farben all prospered spectacularly from a Bolshevized Russia. Lenin and Trotsky in turn cooperated with the depleted German military industrial complex.
At least the corporations could make good use of a miserable situation.
America
Things were very different for America. Wilson just sent troops to “fight-off” the Bolshevik threat. How could they simply turn around and begin openly investing with Lenin and Trotsky?
The narrative was actually quite clever. Even before the 1917 revolution was in full swing, the story was that if American (and British) investment did not occur in Russia, then the Germans would do it instead. In other words, America must patriotically and proudly invest with the Bolsheviks, because “Zee Germans”.
In a 1919 U.S. Senate Hearing on Bolshevik Propaganda, the deputy to Federal Reserve Board member William B. Thompson, Raymond Robbins, testified to exactly that:
In the same year, several major contracts were secured by American corporations with the Soviet Union:
Bolshevism was good for business, so long as they made prompt payment.
Bolshevik Working Capital
Both the German and American corporations were making their profits from the demand of the newly formed Soviet Union. However, how was the Soviet Union going to pay for all this? The nation lay in rack and ruin, the people were poorer than ever, and the aristocracy that owned most of the capital in Russia were either in gulags or they were dead.
None of these corporations were going to help transform Russia into the Soviet Union without being paid in real money. Lenin and Trotsky needed to find a way to borrow the money, pay the corporations, and then find a way to pay back their debts over time. What they needed was working capital finance, and the globalist banking cartels were only too eager to facilitate their requests.
William Boyce Thompson was appointed a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1914. He was openly supportive of the Bolshevik cause, and travelled to Petrograd in 1917. Publicly, Thompson was representing the American Red Cross and their mission into Russia. Privately, he was organizing a huge payment to Lenin and Trotsky so they could complete their Marxist revolution.
The American Red Cross in Russia was nothing more than an NGO that allowed for the laundering of USD from America to Russia, via the Federal Reserve. The Bolsheviks were now flush with cash, but nowhere near enough to complete their mission.
Lenin and Trotsky decided to raid and confiscate gold from every corner of Russia they controlled. In 1920, gold shipments began flowing from Russia and into any bank that would accept their gold deposits. Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Guaranty Trust and J.P. Morgan banks were all critical in the transfer of Russian gold into the Western banking system. Before doing so, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. requested permission from the US State Department.
Olof Aschberg was of course front-and-center in the Russian gold heist.
It would have been impossible for the Soviet Union to succeed without the finance provided to them during the pivotal years of 1919 – 1930. There was an incredible profit to be made by the banks which facilitated in the rape and robbery of Russia.
The gold that was transferred out of Russia made its way into the Western banking system. These transfers were recognized as legitimate bank deposits and allowed the Soviets to participate in international trade, as well as pay off the corporations they used to “transform” Russia into the Soviet Union.
However, the Russian gold deposits also provided a windfall for the Western banks who participated. Back then, the world was still on a quasi-gold standard. While the Federal Reserve System, along with other central banks around the world, maintained their currencies to a fixed price of gold, they were allowed to issue up to 300% more of their currency in circulation than the gold they had on deposit.
Therefore, the new Russian gold in the vaults of these banks allowed them to create and circulate far more in credit. In many cases, the credit was provided back to the Soviet Union as loans when they were in dire straits:
In other words, the old Russian gold was used in a monetary merry-go-round. The gold deposits allowed the banks to rapidly expand credit, which in turn was used to provide loans back to the Soviets so they could import goods and services into their broken nation. By doing so, the bankers provided a perpetual source of working capital finance. The banks and corporations feeding off the Soviet ideology made vast fortunes, as did the Bolsheviks in control of Russia.
All of this was at the expense of the Russian people, who for a moment believed that Marx’s ideology was the answer to their miserable existence.
Marxism is a Racket.
Panopticon Redux
At the end of this article we provide a series of documentaries regarding the hell of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Gulag system that was implemented very soon after Lenin declared Russia to be under his Marxist control. For those who do not know the full extent of the horror that the Bolsheviks unleashed on the Russian people, it is well worth the few hours to understand the intentions of Marxists once they gain power.
As we have laid out in this series, Marxism is a complete failure as an organic movement. It was only once the bankers and crony capitalists realized the immense profit opportunities to be extracted from a Marxist revolution that the destructive movement became a reality. It was never about the people; it was always about wiping out a nation to take over its supply chains and resources for the benefit of the crony-banking billionaire class.
In fact, the people are who stand in the way when it comes to the transformation of a nation into a Marxist hell-hole. They represent a mass of citizenry who de-centrally own the properties, businesses and employ the labor of a nation. They also have rights granted to them by their legal system which makes it very hard to confiscate their lands and businesses. A Marxist revolution obliterates the legal system, deprives the people of their rights, and confiscates their wealth. However, the people are still alive, and very aware of what was just taken away from them. So, what does government do with all these people?
In the Soviet Union, anyone who was an owner of capital, land, or employed too many people was shipped off to the gulags. In many cases, this included their wives and children. The Bolsheviks released dangerous criminals from prisons and deployed them to run the gulags. Women were systematically raped, and everyone was forced into slave labor to build railways, mine coal, gold and other resources.
In other words, these gulags became profitable enterprises, which allowed the Bolsheviks to pay back their loans, with interest. Millions of people died in the labor camps, but those who managed to survive and return back to their villages served as a reminder to everyone else what happens to you if you become an enemy of the state. The CHEKA was the much-feared Bolshevik secret police.
The Cheka arrested, interrogated and executed the Russian people in their campaign to crush dissent. They were immune to legal prosecution, and in effect acted above the law.
Russia had become completely Bolshevized. Its people had been reduced to animals; simply pieces of meat to be used for profit, wherever possible. To keep everyone in-line, some of them were sent to prison-for-profit labor camps, while others were show-trialled in kangaroo courts and executed. Nobody knew where the CHEKA would strike next, so everyone corrected their behavior in order to survive.
In other words, Lenin and Trotsky achieved what Jeremy Bentham tried to achieve 100 years earlier. The entire Soviet Union was now an open air Panopticon, with an all seeing eye implanted into the consciousness of every terrorized citizen.
This was the apex of Enlightenment social engineering. How LIBERAL!!
to be continued…………..
Learn About the Gulags
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Sutton, Antony C. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Clairview, 2016. p16
Sutton, Antony C. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Clairview, 2016. p18
ibid, p38
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ibid
https://www.bethmannbank.de/en/benefits/history.htmlSutton, Antony C. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Clairview, 2016. p18
Sutton, Antony C. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Clairview, 2016. p40
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Sutton, Antony C. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Clairview, 2016. p26
ibid, p27
ibid, p25
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Sutton, Antony C. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Clairview, 2016. p43
ibid
Sutton, Antony C. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Clairview, 2016. p15
ibid, p156
Sutton, Antony C. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Clairview, 2016. p97
ibid, p158
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